Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is London's most familiar book and considered one of his best. Because the protagonist is a dog, it is often mistakenly thought to be particularly suitable for children. The hero, Buck, is a domestic pet who is abducted by thieves and sold to a trainer of sled dogs. In a series of episodes, Buck is forced to survive and adapt to brutal and cruel conditions. He is eventually acquired by a kind and loving—but exploitative—owner, John Thornton. When Thornton is killed by "Yeehat Indians," Buck returns to the wild. Images of death, cruelty, and Darwinian struggle abound. Of the new world Buck enters, London writes "The salient thing of this other world seemed fear." (Such dark themes are typical of Jack London's work, and he defended them in his essay "The Terrible and Tragic in Fiction.")
The University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page [1] (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/banned_books.html) states that "Jack London's writing was censored in several European dictatorships in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929, Italy banned all cheap editions of his Call of the Wild, and Yugoslavia banned all his works as being 'too radical.' Some of London's works were also burned by the Nazis." (These regimes may have been reacting to Jack London's reputation as an outspoken Socialist rather than to the content of the book, which, unlike some of his other novels, has no overt political message).
In 1960, critic Maxwell Geismar called The Call of the Wild "a beautiful prose poem." Editor Franklin Walker said that it "belongs on a shelf with Walden and Huckleberry Finn". E. L. Doctorow called it "a mordant parable... his masterpiece."
External links
Text of The Call of the Wild at Berkeley's Sunsite (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/writings/CallOfTheWild/)
Free eBook of The Call of the Wild (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/215) at Project Gutenberg
For example, The Call of the Wild was published during a period of unprecedented American imperial expansion in the Western hemisphere; but the novel also appeared during a period of intense debate over the influence of French literary Naturalism on English and American fiction.
The criticism of The Call of the Wild became more diverse in the late 1920’s and 1930’s when it was divided between the biographers, the genteel literary critics who resented London, and the more contemporary critics who incorporated the new paradigmatic and disciplinary techniques of Marxism, American Studies, and psychoanalysis into their work.
He has described the call for man as the lure of gold through the mysterious mine and the call for a dog as the yearn for the strangest desires.
I think that Call of the Wild is one of the finest examples of literature for children that there is. It is an amazing book.
In Call of the Wild the civilized Buck has to adapt to the harsh realities of frosty North in which only the stronger prosper and in order for an individual to survive you must all work as a team.
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